Prospects of Dynamical Determination of General Relativity Parameter β and Solar Quadrupole Moment with Asteroid Radar Astronomy

Abstract

We evaluated the prospects of quantifying the parameterized post-Newtonian parameter β and solar quadrupole moment J 2 with observations of near-Earth asteroids with large orbital precession rates (9 to 27 arcsec century −1 ). We considered existing optical and radar astrometry, as well as radar astrometry that can realistically be obtained with the Arecibo planetary radar in the next five years. Our sensitivity calculations relied on a traditional covariance analysis and Monte Carlo simulations. We found that independent estimates of β and J 2 can be obtained with precisions of 6 × 10 −4 and 3 × 10 −8 , respectively. Because we assumed rather conservative observational uncertainties, as is the usual practice when reporting radar astrometry, it is likely that the actual precision will be closer to 2 × 10 −4 and 10 −8 , respectively. A purely dynamical determination of solar oblateness with asteroid radar astronomy may therefore rival the helioseismology determination.

Expected precision of Europa Clipper gravity measurements

“…We used version 124 of the Mission Operations and Navigation Toolkit Environment (MONTE) (Evans et al, 2016), an astrodynamics computing platform that is developed at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In addition to its uses in trajectory design and spacecraft navigation, MONTE has been used for a variety of scientific purposes, including gravity analysis (Verma and Margot, 2016), orbit determination (Greenberg et al, 2017), and sensitivity analysis for tests of general relativity (Verma et al, 2017).…”

The NAROO digitization center

“…The two most important PPN parameters are γ, which describes the spatial space-time curvature, and β, which parameterizes the nonlinearity in the time component of the space-time metric. Perihelion precession of asteroids is directly connected with β. NAROO, combined with Gaia data (Mouret 2011) and Radar data (Verma et al 2017) will lead to a substantial improvement of the constraints of β. Another approach is to consider a violation of the strong equivalence principle (SEP) which can appear in many alternative theories to GR.…”

An Adaptive Scheduling Tool to Optimize Measurements to Reach a Scientific Objective: Methodology and Application to Measurements of Stellar Orbits in the Galactic Center

“…Konopacky et al 2016), measurements of asteroids in order to infer orbital parameters, detect relativistic effects or infer their internal properties (see e.g. Farnocchia et al 2013;Hees et al 2015;Greenberg et al 2017;Verma et al 2017), Lunar Laser Ranging measurements to infer the properties of the Moon and to perform tests of fundamental physics (see e.g. Nordtvedt 1998;Bourgoin et al 2016Bourgoin et al , 2017Viswanathan et al 2018), radioscience tracking of spacecraft through the Deep Space Network antennas to follow the spacecraft motion or to infer planetary properties (see e.g.…”